Paul B. Brown: I am one of the co-authors of Just Start: Take action; embrace uncertainity and create the future, as well as an extremely proud Forbes alum. A former writer and editor at Business Week, Inc. and Financial World, in addition to my six years at Forbes, I've also written, co-written and “ghosted” numerous best-sellers including Customers for Life (with Carl Sewell.) A long-time contributor to The New York Times, I am also a contributing editor to both The Conference Board Review (where I also write a column) and M.I.T.’s Sloan Management Review.
Len Schlesinger: I am president of Babson College, widely recognized as the world’s leading educational institution for entrepreneurship. I formerly served as vice chairman and chief operating officer of Limited Brands.
Charles Kiefer: I am President of Innovation Associates, Inc., a firm I founded the firm in 1976. Along with Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline. The IA staff pioneered the body of concepts and methods now called organizational learning that enable large organizations to innovate, and to change from being driven by circumstance and managed through compliance, to being characterized by aspiration and deep commitment.

Entrepreneurs Can Save The World (And Revitalize The U.S. Economy.) Will Either Obama Or Romney Help Make It Happen?

Re: Entrepreneurship Can Save The World and Revitalize the United States. Will you help make it happen?

Gentlemen:

We aren’t engaging in hyperbole, with that headline that says entrepreneurship can revitalize the U.S. An entrepreneurial mindset is a wonderful tool to use to try to solve what seem to be unsolvable problems—everything from the health care crisis to social ills.

Many policy makers and experts (including some on both your staffs) believe that effective large scale change needs to be driven from the top down and must be rooted in deep planning (“Big problems require big solutions.”) And yet experience shows that is probably not the case. These huge problems involve so many fundamental constituencies that trying to organize them to move forward together collapses under the weight of political ideology, infighting and competing personal agendas. (Have you guys taken a look at Congress lately?)

If we examine the three of the grand problems of our time—health care, energy and education—all of them have fundamentally resisted top down intervention and all of them now are starting to yield to local or community-based, bottom up experimentation. Yes, we have large numbers of people who are thinking deeply about these issues. We don’t want to stop that but we need to understand that that deep thought needs to get merged with evidence. i.e. smart action that generates the evidence for the learning that helps us figure out where to go.

Massive change can evolve from the bottom up. The “Arab Spring” we saw in the Middle East in early 2011 is one of the more powerful indication of the ability of people to self-organize entrepreneurially to obtain what they want.

One major advantage of taking small, start steps is that it helps to over-come what we have come to think of as “the tyranny of the optimal right answer.”

We desperately want certain things to be better and we turn to the planners, policy-makers and experts to help us. The problem is, of course, these experts (your experts) don’t agree. While some tell you something can be done, others say “It can’t be done.” (Or “it will have horrific side effects”; or “someone else has tried something similar and it did not work,” or….)

The problem here is not that the future is unpredictable. Each side is near-certain about their prediction. It’s just that these predictions utterly contradict each other. One expert is certain about something and another is certain about exactly the opposite. The result is an image of the future that is potentially predictable to some degree, but effectively unknowable because of the lack of any common ground. And an impasse. So nothing happens.

The way to break this in action is with small, smart steps that are limited by Acceptable Loss. You don’t know what is going to happen and the only way you’re going to find out what is going to happen is take a step, and see where you are and figure out what the next step is.

This argues for taking a number of new, small, smart steps—a pilot project here; a different way of doing things over there—to see what happens. Positive outcomes can be built upon the experiments that show promise.

In a world where nobody really knows you want to generate as many solutions as possible. Taking such smart steps is an essential key to making the impossible possible. Smart action in the face of the unknown is better than arrested progress due to more debate.

Everybody who is intellectually oriented (like you gentlemen) will say “Oh no, when you are facing complicated situations it better to think it through because until you understand it you’re likely to take a disastrous step.” But small steps are not disastrous, even if they are wrong. Big, high impact ideas have their place. But there is no evidence that it is only through big ideas that we resolve the issues.

One quick example involving a former president makes the point. In 1972, Jimmy Carter called for wholesale changes in the behavior of Americans to fundamentally reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Mileage requirements for cars went up dramatically and certain conservation efforts became mandatory. And yet, we are no where close to being energy self-sufficient.

Yet, at the same time we have seen that the steps of both individuals and organizations have taken on their own, in their communities or with their employers reduce their carbon footprint have defused and spread on a large scale. These smart actions show much more promise for being able to address these issues than our ability to be able to move big policy initiatives through government.

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“One quick example involving a former president makes the point. In 1972, Jimmy Carter called for wholesale changes in the behavior of Americans to fundamentally reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Mileage requirements for cars went up dramatically and certain conservation efforts became mandatory. Today, our dependence our foreign oil is higher than it was then.”

Funny I just read that on Bloomberg,com that our dependence on foreign oil is a 42% a 20 year low.

Bill, thanks for the note. Actually the figure is higher than 42%. See http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_brief/foreign_oil_dependence.cfm. But you are right, I did not word things exactly the way I wanted to. Instead of going in and trying to explain yes, the overally percentage is down, but the imports are up (because we are using more energy today) I went back in and fiddled with the post. Thanks for flagging the issue.